Between the Strategy Deck and the Invoice: Data Platform and AI Economics for 2027

Kierra Dotson
Karl Ivo Sokolov

Most AI and data platform decisions are made in one language and paid for in another. Strategy gets written in decks and roadmaps, and the bill arrives as run-rate, licences, inference cost and headcount that nobody modelled.

Kierra and Karl Ivo come at that gap from opposite ends. Kierra opens upstream of the business case, where the economics are largely set before anyone calculates ROI: what you are actually building, which capabilities you end up owning, and how much of the case rests on conditions the company does not control, from model and cloud dependencies to where data is allowed to move.

Karl Ivo comes in from the CFO side, where that investment meets financial machinery built for deterministic projects. No slides, no exercises, no breakout groups, and everyone gets a turn to talk. Come with one decision you are currently making or deferring, and one number you expect Finance to ask you for.

90 minutes. Tentative format: three discussion rounds of roughly twenty minutes, moving from what this really costs, to what value is actually being bought, to what should change in the 2027 plan.